


Within the Mind

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Should Never Have Existed [8]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Blood and Gore, Cole (Dragon Age) Being Cole, Cole (Dragon Age) Talks A Lot, Demonic Possession, Dragon Age Quest: Champions of the Just, Gen, Mind Games, Nightmares, Non-Canon Inquisitor (Dragon Age), POV Cole (Dragon Age), Poetic, Red Lyrium, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 19:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14479470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: Gereon Alexius, who has travelled back in time and accidentally made himself Herald of Andraste, is now busily following the Inquisition storyline. Having chosen to investigate the Templars rather than the mages (since he was unable to as much as look Fiona in the eye when he met her in Val Royeaux, much less negotiate with her), he is now entrapped by the Envy Demon, which shows him the dark future he could have created. And Cole is concerned.





	Within the Mind

He is here, he is here, he is here!

 

Well… He has always been here. Thinking, searching, aching, wondering. This is his mind, after all. Less old than he believes, more tired than he admits, battered by inward screams like a lonesome Tevinter tower in the wilderness is battered by the wind, abandoned and sad.

 

But now he is here in a different way. Now he has to fight Envy. It has been watching and waiting, skulking and stalking, planning, plotting - and pondering, pondering, pondering how it can become him.

 

It is hard to mould into a new face for him - an Un-Him, cold as a living statue, with an angry, ravenous green flame eating up his pupils, looking the way the Lord Seeker looked when his shadow sliced, dagger-like, across the white pavement of Val Royeaux, and the steel rattled in his voice, calling the Templars into the red song’s arms.

 

Itis hard to be him, to copy him and create an Un-Him, because he is woven out of too many tangled outlines - black and bright, gloomy and golden, edges of different sets of letters overlaying messily, two stories mushed into one.

 

He lived one story as a shadow of red, a hooded stranger on the doorstep of Redcliffe Castle, thrusting the arl out into the grey, clammy wetness of the rain, and pulling the rebel mages into a tight net like quivering, captured birds, with terrified little hearts that throb into a frenzy under your fingertips.

 

But that story ended when he tried to turn back time, to stop the one who came to stop him - young face tilted up to glare at him, daring, determined, unafraid; Maker, she is almost a child, younger than my boy; what am I doing? But I have no choice; I have gone too far; I need to finish this; I need to finish with her… With that little mistake… that should never have existed.

 

That story ended when he tried to write over the mistake that her life was to his master. To the weaver of a bigger net where he was the bird - ‘Clucking mother hen, Dorian would call me’.

 

That story ended when he faced down the young hero, and tried put out the light in her hand. And with the gears of time spinning back, faster and faster, clicking and creaking and ready to explode into a shower of springs, the second story began, impossible, irreversible. A story where he carries the light instead of the little hero; where he is the one they call the Herald; where he is the one that the net-weaver wants dead.

 

And Envy is doing its best to kill him. It turns his mind into a maze, foggy, fractured, frustrating, where the walls threaten to close in on him at any moment, squashing him, bug-like, within his own skull. Round every corner, it shows him visions: clots of black slime in swamp-green light, which suddenly turn into people, places, stories. And every story is so wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

It shows him what Thedas will look like under the reign of the Herald that is also a Venatori. A demon is disguise, swathing itself into those robes of red once more; Un-Him taking full form.

 

Un-Him does not care how the second story is supposed to go; Un-Him is still loyal to the Elder One, the weaver of nets, with long hardened claws sinking through the feathers and reaching to the heart of every frightened bird in the world.

 

Envy shows him his companions, who once trusted him, allowed him to be in their midst, believed that, with his Mark, he could do good, even though he had come south to hurt people. In the vision, they are found guilty of 'conspiring against the Herald’, and slapped in chains, and dragged away into tiny cells, where the red crystals wait within the walls, thirsty for flesh to fill, for blood to poison, for eye sockets to nestle in, bristling with glittering ruby needle points.

 

Most of them have their torment drawn out, their bodies faint and fading with no food or water, until they themselves become food and water for the greedy crystals. Shards… inside my throat… Can’t breathe… Leli stopped screaming in the cell next door… I wish the Herald would tell me what he wants me to confess…

 

But the Seeker - light of Faith, kindling fire inside his heart, but meaningless to Un-Him - does not die slowly. She fights back, fights to her very last breath, with her sword, and her fists when her sword is taken, and her teeth when her arms hang limp and broken by her sides. She fights until she is tossed back onto the red spikes, so that they pass through her chest, spearing her, shattering her, draining her of blood. She coughs out her last words with a long string of gore, wet and red and teitching. Like her lips are. Like her eyes are.

 

'Should never… have cared… for you…’

 

Then, Envy shows him two more figures, two more people doomed to die. Both full of light, full of youth and hope and wonder that has now turned to righteous rage. The rage that rushed them to chase and seek across wilds and seas, to leave their homeland and confront the shadow that pretends to be the man they knew.

 

One burns slightly brighter than the other, because the other has been sick for a long, long time. Black blood and black nights, bubbling fever and babbling whispers; Father used to make it better, but I… Have I made it worse? Has looking for a cure turned him into a monster?

 

The sickness within him sings, sings without end; a loud, demanding song that hurts his very bone marrow. But the sing does not hurt nearly as much as looking the Un-Him in the eye, and seeing only ice.

 

'This… This is not you, Father… I can’t believe it’s you! What are you doing? To yourself; to the world?!’

 

'I know what you are doing, boy,’ the Un-Him drawls, an echo of a thousand darknesses, a thousand faces of Envy, trapped in his voice. 'You are interfering with Inquisition business - which is a crime punishable by death’.

 

A snap of Un-His fingers, a snap of a brittle mortal neck - and the song goes quiet, and the body drops, reaped by the glowing scythe of magic, which Un-Him still plays with as the brighter young man lashes at him, the black lines that he used to make his eyes prettier now leaking like his heart leaks. Another snap - and the brighter light goes out too.

 

And finally, Envy shows him the world. Smoking, smouldering, suffocating. Ravaged and ploughed by the Elder One’s burning net. Buildings, streets, towns slipping into the nothingness of black chasms filled with the green vapours of the Fade. The ground tilting and cracking and turning inside out as the Breach fumes and flares out of control. Demons moving, moving, moving in a mindless march, their bloody trail smudging over the names on the map that once made sense. While Un-Him looks on, his hand curling its venomous green claws, his Mark now owned by the Elder One. Used not to mend the hurting Veil but to rip it up.

 

Seeing all of this, living all of this, watching everyone who ever mattered to him die cursing his name - that would be enough to make him mad. To make him want to curl up on the blood-splattered floor of his mind, small and whimpering, and allow Envy to do what it wills. But he won’t.

 

Because I am also here, with him and Envy.

 

And I will help.


End file.
